“What are zoos for?”

From the BBC: “A zoo in Germany has refused to help two polar bear cubs who were rejected by their mother and are now believed to have been eaten by her. So if zoos won’t help to save the lives of animals, what are they for?” The article goes on to discuss different aspects of “conservation,” “nature,” “the wild,” and the fact that zoos literally make animals insane. I thought this quote was pretty interesting:

“When we’ve taken over their lives, made them dependent on us, and submitted them to an unnatural regime, we have a special moral responsibility for them… The creation of dependency always involves direct duties. It’s implausible to argue that just because it happens in nature, we should allow it to happen in an environment where we have artificially made them dependent on us” (Professor Andrew Linzey, director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics).